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Our meetings are designed for people over 50 with a minimum of $100,000 of investable assets, not including your home or real estate. If you do not yet have our minimum, please keep us in mind as your assets continue to grow.

Attend a Retirement Matters Seminar!

There is No Charge or Obligation and You will Learn How to Help Your Money Last as Long as You do.

Our meetings are designed for people over 50 with a minimum of $100,000 of investable assets, not including your home or real estate. If you do not yet have our minimum, please keep us in mind as your assets continue to grow.

We would love to review your retirement plan with you and see if we can help you. If we can help you, that’s terrific, if not that’s fine too. Either way, there is no charge or obligation, and we will part friends!

Trade Negotiations with China Are Front and Center.

If it seems like you have seen the two main bullet points for this week’s email before, it’s because you have. We could have simply cut and pasted them into this week’s email.

In our view, China and the Federal Reserve continue to be at the center of what is causing volatility in the stock markets.

At this writing, we don’t know if the meeting between President Trump and President Xi have borne any positive fruit, but certainly, most eyes are looking to see what happens.

We view this current state of affairs as the precursor for a trade deal as both sides get down to the serious business at hand. We believe that China does not want to be seen as losing face and they have to present a defiant tone publicly. However, the reality is that a trade war with the United States would devastate their economy and set them back years. A devastated economy would create millions of unemployed in China and could create great social unrest.

It is difficult for us to see that China wants to go there, and because of this, we see the trade negotiations resulting in a deal.

I would like to invite you to come to one of our seminars. They are designed for those of you who are retired or retiring soon, and they are free.

At the free retirement seminar we will answer these burning questions:

How do I protect my retirement from the next market crash?

How do I avoid three basic “pitfalls” of retirement distribution planning?

We believe that the biggest threat to the global economy is our own Federal Reserve. The volatility that we saw in November appears to have been a reaction to the Federal Reserve’s desire to raise interest rates again this year and three times next year.

With global debt at record levels and much of it denominated in U.S. dollars, the Fed’s actions not only affect what happens in our country but also in many others. If the Fed is only focusing on the United States economy, our inflation, our unemployment, and our growth, then they are ignoring the fact that as they raise interest rates, this puts a hardship on many emerging countries around the world.

If these countries experience enough hardship, they could default on their debt, and we view this as the trigger for a global economic crisis. Because of this, we view the Federal Reserve as the most dangerous financial institution on earth.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, announced last week that interest rates were approaching “neutral.” As we see it, this was his face-saving way of saying that they have gotten the message, and they have changed their mind about raising interest rates as aggressively going forward.

We Are Thankful That We Have a Sell Strategy.

Without it, we would find it very difficult to justify investing in the stock market at this time. We believe there is still upside, but we also believe that when the downside comes, it could be very bad.

Our strategy enables us to participate in the upside as long as it lasts; it is also designed to get us out with tolerable losses when the trend changes.

It is our singular goal to keep our clients from becoming poor. Preserving the wealth that they have built is job number one for us. I encourage you to join the Money Matters family!

I believe that avoiding large losses is the single most important thing that we should be concerned about as investors.

Perhaps you were given a package by your employer. Perhaps you sold an asset and want to know how to properly invest the proceeds. Perhaps you inherited money and want to keep it safe and grow it if you can. Perhaps you just want a second opinion. These are all reasons for you to take advantage of all the resources that we at Money Matters have to offer you.

We want to help you achieve your retirement goals.

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I hope it finds you and yours in good health and spirits.

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